A new bed quilt

The terrible cold weather, even in Cornwall, has continued so no gardening and almost no walking.  It is good to look at this month's photo on the calendar and realise that some places are hot!

This is sunset at Changi beach, Singapore.  Changi beach is next to the airport and it is a very noisy place but popular with the locals who go there for picnics, taking their dogs, small tents to shelter from the hear and sun and even their cats on leads!  And most of them travel there by bus so I don't know how they carry everything.

Back in England I have got hooked into making a new quilt for my bed.  First I finished the quilt for the Alzheimers charity which enabled me to try out the block design I had chosen.

Not one of my best efforts I am afraid.  With hindsight I don't think glueing it was a good idea.  The quilting has puckered badly but then I realised that there might be something wrong with my walking foot.  This foot is twelve years old and has worked very hard.  I tend to think things will last for ever so I tried it out over various thicknesses of fabric and it was not 'walking' properly even when it was just two or three pieces of cotton rather than a proper sandwich.  This morning I was speaking to a professional longarm quilter and she said they could 'go'.  Fortunately it was not a disaster as my small Bernina came with a walking foot and I found that it fitted the old machine perfectly.  So this quilt is now finished and ready to be sent off.

As I said in my last posting I decided the best way to tackle a large kingsize quilt was to use precut fabric.  Here it is:

I bought the fabric from Kaleidescope www.kalquilts.com as I love their range of batiks.  It is quite difficult choosing this sort of thing from a website and the colours include rather a lot of purples for my taste.  Basically it is blackcurrant colours.

However there are also greens and turquoises and some of the pinks are lovely.  My husband HATES pink and for many years it was banned in this household!  I will have to buy some fabric for the border in due course so I shall probably try to find something in the blue/green range.  So far it appears that Hoffman makes up these packs from fabrics that don't then appear on suppliers' websites as yardage although the plain colours are generally there.

I have made 63 blocks and the sashing strips to go between them.  I am now stitching the sashing to the squares and am making good progress, having completed three and a half rows of nine squares.  I have to lay it out on the bed to see the whole thing as I do not have a design wall (a piece of foam) that is anywhere large enough for the whole thing so I probably won't have an idea of the whole thing for some time yet.  More pictures will follow soon.

This is not a cheap way of making a quilt.  Two sets of strips and two packs of ten inch squares cost over £100.  I have found a shop with a good range of extra wide quilt backs and sent off for samples for this quilt and another one that has been waiting for over a year to be sent to the longarm quilter.  I am going to send both quilts by Parcelforce as the quilter is at the other end of Cornwall and it is really too far to drive twice (two hours each way).  It will be strange to have new quilts on the beds but I am doing a major refurbishment of my bedroom and this quilt will probably last me out!

A new quilting tool: the iPad

I need to replace the quilt on my bed as the one I made in about 2001 is falling to pieces.  It is huge and when I finished the present one I swore I would never make another bed-sized quilt.  But if I don't I am not going to have one at all!

I have spent a lot of time wondering how to buy the fabric, given that there are almost no shops down here, I find it difficult to match colours on-line and I will not be going to FOQ this year (mainly because my husband if involved with a conference in London and someone has to be here to mind the cats).  So I have decided to use layer cakes and jelly rolls.  This meant I needed to choose a design.  I decided to buy one of Pam Lintott's books and settled on Layer Cake, Jelly Roll and Charm Quilts.  I bought the Kindle version, partly because it was cheaper and partly because it is not available in the bookshops down here. My Kindle is an app. on my iPad.  I have always thought that having Kindle versions of quilting books would not work but now I realise that you just take the iPad into the studio and keep it open at the page you are working on.  You can also take photos of works in progress and this was brilliant for arranging the blocks.  I still have to work out where to put the notes I would normally scribble in the book but I guess I should start using the Notes function on the iPad.

When I make a big quilt I like to do a trial block.  Last week I heard about a project to make quilts as a fundraiser for Alzheimers in Scotland You can find details at www.annhillquilter.co.uk. It occurred to me that I could make them a quilt to try out the design for my bed quilt.  I have opted for one called 'Old Gold'.  The quilts have to be forty inches square which meant nine blocks plus a three inch border.  I tend not to get involved in projects with deadlines these days and these have to be submitted by May.  The aim is to cover the football pitch at Hampden Park in Glagow with 5000 quilts.

I did not want to have to buy anything for this project.  The top is made from fabrics in my stash and I have chosen to work in bright colours as a change from all those landscapes.

I knew I had some big pieces of wadding and I have managed to find a piece for the backing that I bought for something else but have not used.  Over the weekend I put the top together.

Yesterday I put a dark blue batik border on it and this afternoon I have put the 'sandwich' together.  I decided to risk glueing it rather than having more problems with machine quilting and pins.  I think some free random quilting will be needed in the blocks and I am very out of practice at that!  First, I plan to quilt a straight line grid on the sashing using random threads in primary colours.  Watch this space.

Whatever happened to March?

At the beginning of the year I decided that each month I would post the photo I had chosen for our calendar for that month.  So here we are in mid-March and I realise I completely forgot to do it.  So here it is:

This is a villa on the shores of Lake Como at a place called Corenno Plinio.  We had a picnic lunch there on the holiday I took in September 2011.

I have been busy this month and have done quite a bit of my lap quilt.  I am machine quilting it but it is so long since I have done anything this size that my skills are deteriorating.  There are numerous places where the machine has jumped stitches.  I cannot be bothered to undo them all.  I think the problem is the machine going over pins even though I take them out as I sew.  I did once have a problem with the needle jumping that required professional help but I do not think that is the case this time.

I have brought the quilt into the house so that I can end off the threads in comfort.  Big mistake.  Pania is addicted to wadding and when I have left it lying around a couple of times I have returned to find she has chewed the wadding on the edge.  Now it is living in a pillow case.  Here is a photo of Pania and Hinemoa on the quilt.  They just think quilts are for them.

Threads for machine quilting

My lap quilt is now all ready to quilt.

  I am proud of the fact that I have managed to make the backing from leftover pieces from the front.

However, this does pose a question as to the best thread to use in the bobbin.  I plan to quilt 'in the ditch' and I certainly do not want to be stopping and changing bobbins all the time.  As it is some years since I machine quilted a quilt of this size (it is 62 inches square) I decided I would consult my fellow Contemporary Quilters by putting a message up on the Yahoo site.  I am aware that we have had a lot of new members recently and I thought that some of them would probably be interested in the answers too.

Well, a question like this leads to answers of the 'how long is a piece of string (thread)' variety.  It appears that there are quilters who would never dream of pressing their seams open although I seem to remember learning years ago that that is what you did when machine piecing and that pressing the seams to one side was for hand-stitching.  Not so, apparently.  The seams on this quilt are pressed open and I have never had any problems with them wearing out, not even on the quilt on my bed which has been washed frequently.

The second issue is what thread to use on the bottom.  Obviously I have a problem about colour as light thread will show up on the dark and dark on the light.  I am inclined to go with the person who suggested variegated thread as I know that will blend in a bit better.  I also asked about the weight of the thread in the bobbin.  Originally I think I used to use the same thread top and bottom but then people said you should use something a bit lighter weight in the bobbin so that it disappeared into the quilt and did not migrate through to the top.  (My Bernina can be a bit temperamental about all this.)  Several people have recommended Bottom Line thread by Superior Threads.  This is not one I have tried and I see that it is polyester which I have been a bit snobby about in the past.  I think that was because I was using pure cotton in the top and thought I should be using cotton in the bottom too.  I respect the people who recommended this, at least one of whom said she uses rayon embroidery thread in the top, so I will definitely buy some.

For the top thread I plan to use a variegated thread I already have.  I have quite a range of reels of variegated quilting threads in shades of brown, beige and grey but half the labels have fallen off so I am not sure what they are.  I generally use YLI but a couple of these reels are ones I bought while doing a workshop and I cannot identify the brand..  One person recommended King Tut thread so I looked it up on-line and I think at least one of my unidentified reels is definitely that.  At least I will now be able to work out its weight.  The general advice is to balance the weights.

Some people commented on needles.  One person said she always used a 60.  I would not be able to see that nor to thread it, given that I have never mastered the needle threader on the Bernina and my varifocal glasses have their limitations.  I have only ever gone as fine as a 70 and have to confess to a 90 quilting needle as my default.

This tiny piece of market research has proved yet again that everyone has a preferred way of doing things and that there are many different threads and techniques that people use.  I think the next step is for me to do a few trial pieces but not until I have bought some Bottom Line thread and a new pair of quilting gloves.  The ones in the photo have a hole at the tip of one of the fingers where I had to cut the glove after I had sewn it to the quilt.

What I made in January

I have somewhat reluctantly decided not to do the Journal Quilts project this year as I think I am no longer very good at working to deadlines.  There is nothing to stop me doing journal quilts without the deadlines and the rules of course but I have begun the year by making a quilt top.  I have a collection of batik fabrics in shades of brown and grey which I have built up over a couple of years and it was time to turn them into something.  A new lap quilt for the sitting room I decided so I went back to my cherished copy of Cut Loose Quilts by Jan Mullen and have made a top in the same design as one I did nearly ten years ago.

The top is now complete.

Here is the old one.

I was rather proud of the back of the old one which I made from all the leftovers.  It was a bit of a nightmare getting them to fit together but I have decided to do something similar with this quilt because I have a couple of large lengths of batik in colours and patterns related to the front.

I quilted that one myself.  After machining it all in the ditch I made a couple of stencils of the patterns in the fabric and then hand quilted the motifs in the plain blue blocks.

I am not sure I have the patience to do that again.  It was one of those winter evening jobs in the days when I could just about quilt and see the TV at the same time!  The new one may go to a longarm quilter but first I need to put the back together.  I also plan to make a replacement quilt for the one on my bed as it is beginning to fall to pieces.  I bought some fabrics as a start last year but I have had to put them somewhere out of the cats' reach and now I cannot find them anywhere.  Perhaps that is a signal that I need to do something more creative and challenging first.  I had something pinned up to start me thinking but when the first floods hit the village I took it down and brought it into the house for safety.  I seem to remember that I had decided a bit of printing was needed as the next step so now I have no excuse not to get back to it.

I have not given a link to Jan Mullen's book as it is out of print.  I have used it a number of times because everything is 'rough' cut and you do not have to get all the points to meet which just suits me fine.

Welcome to February

This is the photo for February on this year's calendar.  It is Whitesand Bay beyond Sennen Cove.  I can't remember what time of the year I took it but obviously the tide is out and I have used a wide angle lens.  We went to Sennen last Sunday.  There were only about two other cars there and the tide was right in.  It was too windy to walk so we sat and looked at the view like real oldies and then got out of the car to take a few photos. Mine have had to be straightened in Photoshop but look at the difference to the one above.  Different camera of course and more of a telephoto effect.

I also tried drawing this view on my iPad.  I realised I have drawn/photographed it many times before so I think I should now try some more drawings of it using some of my photos.

We are very glad to see the back of January since it was so wet.  When the rest of the country was suffering from snow a couple of weeks ago we had another little flood across the road.  I only noticed it when I went out next morning and found gravel and mud all over the road not to mention bits of branch just outside our gate so I think it must have been quite high on our side of the road.  Let's hope we don't get any more.  The spring bulbs are beginning to poke through the sodden ground and there are lots of camellias out on the far side of the village although we only have two blooms.  I think the gardens over there must face south.

A Drawing a Day - or Not

I thought I needed to give a progress report on my attempts to do a drawing a day following the instructions in the book I mentioned in my last posting.  I am afraid progress is incredibly slow for two reasons:
1.  It is not easy to put aside even half an hour a day every day so several days pass with nothing to show for them.
2.  Like Clare Smith I find myself doing tatty sketches that end up in the bin.  I tend to be very self-critical of my artistic efforts and the idea of showing them to the world is quite off-putting.  However, here is how I started.

These are a set of 'naive' Christmas ornaments which I drew before I put them away for another year.  The drawing made very few demands as it did not even require any perspective so I then moved on to still life, using objects that were just around the room.  The results are not publishable!

I can buy early daffodils extremely cheaply from the village shop as they are grown round here (see my recent posting with photos).  I drew last week's flowers in a vase along with various other objects but the flowers died after a week so yesterday I bought some more and found myself talking to the farmer who grew them. (He was clad in sandals without socks and a  padded sleeveless waistcoat but had bare arms and the temperature was about 3 degrees so work that one out.)  This drawing is done with a nib pen and ink as suggested in the book.  I am beginning to get the hang of daffodils although at this stage I am still on the chapter about line and mark making.  I find it very difficult to work directly in ink and not be able to rub out as I am used to sizing things up by holding my pencil at arm's length, and blocking in the main shapes in the picture.

A couple of days ago I decided that I should incorporate drawing on the iPad into this project.  I own Brushes (which I have never used) and Sketchbook Pro.  I bought this months ago and after a flurry of enthusiasm have not used it in ages.  Here are examples of my early drawings, based on photographs I took locally.  I have decided that it is not evil to work from photos provided I took them myself and made the decisions about composition etc. both when taking them and when editing them.

And here is what I have done today.  First the daffodils.

And then I drew the books piled up on the table where I was working.

There is an on-going conversation about iPads on the SAQA Yahoo group this weekend and it is interesting to learn that I am not the only one who finds getting used to the feeling of a stylus and screen a bit difficult.  I find it hard to draw straight lines of any length but it may just need more practice.

Finally, it has been extremely cold here the last couple of days.  We must be the only place in the country not to have snow which is a blessing for those of us with wobbly legs, but it is very cold indeed and the temptation to just curl up on the sofa and do a jigsaw on the iPad is very strong.  The cats like that as all three of them lie on me.  Otherwise they are spending all their time in their igloos, either in the conservatory if it is sunny or in the ones we bought before Christmas and put in front of the radiator in my bedroom.

Pania and Hinemoa are both in the black one.  Being Siamese they are very small and can both fit in one.  Nui is on the right.  He is very large for a Siamese, partly because he is on pills for the chronic kidney condition that killed his litter sister, and on steroids because they all had campobylacter three years ago and he was left with a weak digestive system.  I think he is feeling the cold this weekend but he is eleven years old whereas the girls are only three.